It's a couple of days to Christmas, and it's time to reflect on the year as we move into New Year as well. For me its been an eventful year, almost like three years in one.
This year my world grew larger. The more some things in my life seemed to contract, the more some expanded. Its also a year the meaning of Christmas deepened for me as I studied and embraced some mystical Christian ideas.
It brings me now to contemplate the status of Christianity today, and the rise of the Christian Right. Today fundamentalists are pushing their agenda into civil rights in many parts of the world. In leading free nations like the USA they have succeeded in having constitutional rights stripped from minorities, through ballot measures such as Proposition 8 in California. This measure has stripped the right of marriage from same sex couples, the ability to adoptchildren by unmarried (same sex) couples in other states like Arkansas.
But by what authority do these fundamentalists do these things. Most will say the inerrant
truth of every word of the Bible.
But I view sacred writings - such as the Bible - as initiators of meditation, that connect us to higher energies. The words inspire and uplift us to a higher consciousness, past limiting beliefs into liberation. So for me the reading the Bible is an intuitive process, not a literal one. To see it as a book of regulations alone seems a shallow interpretation of the incredible depth it offers. It's a book to be studied, ingested and tested in real life.
What I have divined from it is an ascending scale of ever refining ideas. I think this makes me a "supercessionist" Biblically. The idea is that the Bible presents themes, even archetypes which evolve and succeed each other. Jesus's life and teaching is considered the penultimate expression of these. And that his penultimate teaching of finding Grace and extending Unconditional Love to all is the fundamental of Christianity. An aim I know meditation supports utterly.
To be active in stripping GLBT's of their right to marry or adopt children is to be heading in a descending direction away from those penultimate teachings towards division and elitism. As a meditator, division and elitism are manifestations of the Ego we seek to subdue. And that's where I'd place the supporters of Prop 8, as creating an elite based on biology. That was an idea we had a world war over. Let's not go there again.
So this Christmas I'll be reflecting that Jesus spent his time amongst lepers, prostitutes, the destitute and the poor - minorities. He was not about marginalizing sections of humanity, but about including all in God's Kingdom, with equal love and dignity.
Much love, Wendy.
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